Dateline: August, 2064. Remembering Before the Great Awokening
It is a relief these days. At 106, no one expects anything from me. Everything I do and remember is a miracle. This morning I am remembering a visit to London, when I thought, that I was old and the world thought we were at the end times.
In the summer of 2024, anti-immigrant riots erupted, first in England and then elsewhere. Anti-racist reaction was swift, but we did not know this would lead to the Global Borderless Solidarity Movement, the Great Awokening, the Reckoning, Retribution, Redistribution, and now The Repair. We could not imagine then how we would change the planet’s trajectory.
I write this for those young folks, some of the Afterennials—not all—who are done looking back, who call for The Repair to be over already.
They don’t want to think about the past anymore. I understand that. But the past is all I think about. I can’t remember yesterday, or this morning. My thoughts don’t stay in one place enough to write a cogent cautionary essay. I share these photos from the Before Time, before the people rose up, on the day the girls were murdered and the fascists mobilized. We rose too, but we didn’t yet know at that moment the power we had to dismantle the walls, to build the bridges, to take down the borders, to take down the billionaires, starting with Elon Musk, to distribute, to find our sharing impulse, to use our brains, to discern the knowledge of ancestors in our hearts and computers.
I am rambling. I know. Here are the photographs.
In the Before Times, there were people without homes. Can you imagine people sleeping on benches? The world was divided into countries and people were denied entry. They were imprisoned for seeking liberty. I know it is hard to imagine, but it was a very short time ago.
See art, below
See description, above.
Another in the series. Think about the insanity. People were homeless. We built all manner of prisons and torture cells, instead of homes.
I don’t have the artist’s information for this ink on cardboard at the Tate Modern. It depicts an early 21st-century Workers May Pole rally, in the design of early 20th-century art, with banners describing hopes and dreams as far as we could imagine at the time, That is me, then, taking it in.
What Is To Be Done?
You will figure it out.
Me?
I Am Done.
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Send me a photo of your May Pole with ribbons/ banners describing your hopes/dreams/ demands, to my email, awmpedalstory@gmail.com
